this and other things demonstrates why (capitalist) libertarianism is such a nonsensical ideology.

it’s tempting to attack it along the lines of “well if you removed all worker protections then we’d be in a capitalist dystopia hellscape of endless suffering” but if you’re assuming that with your very savvy business acumen that you definitely, 100% have because you managed to get a few thousand dollars out of cryptocurrency, you will become one of the few billionaires at the top, why give a shit? it’s heartless but you don’t feel any suffering while cruising around on your yacht which is cruising around in the giant pool of a gigayacht.

instead, one should emphasize that the whole thing of balancing budgets is nonsense, and even the fundamental conceit laying at the heart of libertarianism is just not true; that “the state and market are adversarial opposites” when the exact opposite has been true in capitalist economies for centuries. it also explains why libertarian-oriented parties/leaders which occasionally achieve power (e.g. Milei) never really reduce state power, they just amp up the power of capitalist repression (police, the army, surveillance) while removing worker rights. more-or-less fascism. some libertarians are at least honest and go “oh yeah, this is what I wanted the whole time, I just didn’t want to call myself a fascist because that’s an unattractive word for my ideology” while others are like “goddamn it! our plans are foiled again! why are all our leaders so inconsistent! they just want power, they don’t care about our ideology after all!”

never let these people be regarded as The Economy Understanders just because they have an unhealthy amount of knowledge about the Federal Reserve and how blockchain works

half a century ago: after this whole business in Vietnam is wrapped up, China’s next on the chopping block

Like China, India and Mexico, Brazil doesn’t believe peace negotiations can take place without dialogue between both parties.

we really are at the point where Western diplomatic acumen has atrophied so much that they still believe they can dictate terms despite being in a losing war. like, I guess it’s kinda encouraging that state competency has decayed this much, but it does also mean that WW3 is probably inevitable

I spend some time on curatedtumblr and tumblr. 90% of the posts are nonpolitical and fine, 5% are political and lukewarm, 3% are “not voting for Biden means you literally want every single trans person in the country to die!” which is just boring at this point, and 2% are actually vaguely interesting bad takes

this is like an institutional version of when the general public start becoming conspiracy theorists about vaccines and shit as a deranged response to distrust in state institutions. instead of your 55 year old aunt talking about how “they just have honest questions about vaccine and lockdown efficacy!” it’s now media and thinktank experts putting out reports that Russia may plan to block out the sun using a giant satellite as a response to the failure of their disastrous authoritarian deluded ill-advised tragic brutal totalitarian communist fascist violent devastating terrible ruinous incompetent orwellian amateurish oppressive awful inept attempted illegal unprovoked imperialist colonialist invasion of Ukraine

all it’ll take is one lucky strike and the Romanian defense will come crashing down. I’ve heard through the grapevine that Romania’s rotated players are very demoralized and haven’t been drilling properly. and if not this match, then we should still keep giving the Ukrainian team as much funding as possible or nothing will stop Romania. there are already rumors that other clubs are gonna send over their best coaches to see what they can do

tag yourself, I’m “campists”

The Country of the Week is France!

Feel free to post or recommend any books, essays, studies, articles, and even stories related to France.

If you know a lot about the country and want to share your knowledge and opinions, here are some questions to get you started if you wish:

Check out the reading list. Our books on France:

These books focus on the French Revolution:

• Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of Terror in the French Revolution by Robert Roswell Palmer (1941).
• A People’s History of the French Revolution by Eric Hazan (2014).

These books focus on 19th century French history:

• The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx (1852).
• The Paris Commune: A Brief History by Carolyn J. Eichner (2022).
• Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 by Eugen Weber (1976).

These books focus on 20th and 21st French history:

• France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s Best Values by Ramin Mazaheri (2022).

Next thread here.

I was this kind of liberal back in like 2015, and my reasoning was, in retrospect, essentially entirely predicated on the assumption that Western countries were logical and meritocratic, and so reforms to the FPTP system would be accepted so long as we could demonstrate its superiority. As if the problem was just that politicians needed to be convinced to introduce a better voting system because ranked choice was wrongfully seen as too complicated or something. Luckily I never became a Ranked Choice Guy™, I was still largely apolitical at that point, but the idea of it sounded good and reasonable and common sense so why not believe it.

It later sunk in that no, actually, the system is specifically designed to work this way and the uninspiring candidates and endless broken promises were a feature, not a bug. Also, Australia having mandatory voting and it not meaningfully producing better results was a pretty big point against that whole theory, leading me down the “okay, so we also have to change everybody’s mind and convince them to vote for good candidates, surely the powers that be would not oppose better political education so people don’t vote for conservative parties that don’t benefit them” ideological cul-de-sac until I realized that that’s liberal nonsense and transitioned to a socialist and then communist outlook.

it’s not even a big revenue source or getting you intel or anything, you just use the money you scam from boomers to buy Xi birthday presents

Financial Times: Russia overtook US as gas supplier to Europe in May

Blah blah blah, context and quotes at the start, the meat of the article is here:

The US overtook Russia as a supplier of gas to Europe in September 2022, and has since 2023 accounted for about a fifth of the region’s supply. But last month, Russian-piped gas and LNG shipments accounted for 15 per cent of total supply to the EU, UK, Switzerland, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia, according to data from ICIS. LNG from the US made up 14 per cent of supply to the region, its lowest level since August 2022, the ICIS data showed.

The reversal comes amid a general uptick in European imports of Russian LNG despite several EU countries pushing to impose sanctions on them. Russia in mid-2022 stopped sending gas through pipelines connecting it to north-west Europe, but continues to provide supplies via pipelines through Ukraine and Turkey. Flows in May were affected by one-time factors, including an outage at a major US LNG export facility, while Russia sent more gas through Turkey ahead of planned maintenance in June. Demand for gas in Europe also remains relatively weak, with storage levels near record highs for this time of year.

The reversal was “not likely to last”, said Marzec-Manser of ICIS, as Russia would in the summer be able to ship LNG to Asia via its Northern Sea Route. That was likely to reduce the amount sent to Europe, while US LNG production had picked up again, he said. “Russia has limited flexibility to hold on to this share [in Europe] as demand [for gas] rises into next winter, whereas overall US LNG production is only growing with yet more new capacity coming to the global market by the end of the year,” he added. The transit agreement between Ukraine and Russia also comes to an end this year, putting at risk flows through the route.

the US can’t even subjugate their vassals correctly. good god.

China does also have one of (if not the) largest navies and airforces on the planet, though. I also think that blockading the Strait of Malacca in such a way that it doesn’t immediately crash the world economy, including the US’s, must be very difficult. Nordstream proves that Biden is capable of doing some sicko shit but that was also an explicit benefit to their own economy.

There’s also the Arctic route if China is willing to play the long game and wait for a few years, if they can sufficiently motivate Russia to go all-in there (Putin is committing to making more icebreakers and such AFAIK though)

I do agree though that global shipping routes are pretty fragile now though.

the Zionist-Japanese equivalent of the tweet: “the Republic of Indonesia is made up of 10s of thousands of islands hundreds of cultures and languages. the Estonia is made up of beef and onion slop eating hungarians who polished the cocks of german horses for 1000 years before being elevated to sapience by the USSR”

entirely depends whether these kinds of think tanks actually have any power in the American state or if they’re purely for creating propaganda.

luckily, America is fucked either way if they try and start shit with China, as Ansarallah has proven by beating the American navy

this is entirely incoherent obviously but there are a lot worse people out there even if you don’t count the outright fascists (or alt-right or whatever the Nazis are branding themselves as nowadays). well, maybe not “worse”, but even less informed

like, if a westerner even has opinions on geopolitics and isn’t just in a hedonically depressed treat-addled stupor then that’s what counts as “informed”. to a certain extent I understand the desire to just stay out of shit and try and survive and grill but that position of not caring is only made possible by their position as a member of the golden billion, supported by the exploitation of 7 billion below them, so I still have a lingering dislike of it. they don’t have to care all the time - and I think deliberately and constantly exposing yourself to footage of atrocities (usually for the sake of “staying informed” or “bearing witness to suffering” inevitably in some culturally Christian sense) is counterproductive if it makes you into a doomer who is incapable of reasoned analysis and most importantly, action. Once you’ve decided you’ve seen enough that you know Israel should be destroyed and Zionism purged, there’s no need to watch the videos of hundreds of people dying in an airstrike. But like, they should care at least a little, hopefully enough to overcome their alienation and make connections to any decent groups in their communities.

has been lauded as one of the most effective fighting forces, noted particularly for its role in battling Russian forces in the Moscow-controlled southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol.

we love our losers, folks

Heartwarming: this serial killer only murdered about 5-6 people, much lower than the average!

Nikkei Asia - U.S. tops China as ASEAN’s largest export destination

gotta get those dollars as another economic crisis approaches

I think Biden is basically saying “If you wanna end this empire, then we’ll hit this fucking button. We’ll do it. We ain’t no pussies.” and is acting consistently with that viewpoint, but at the last second, as his fist is coming down on the big red button, it’ll hover and the red telephones will call and civilization will continues. The US probably still has institutional knowledge that MAD is still a operational concept (at the deep state level with the actual empire custodians in the actual rooms where actual decisions are made, not rhetoric or propaganda), but the last three decades of near-total non-opposition has made their restraint atrophy, and in the smoke-filled rooms they are battling it out between “it would be completely counterproductive to end the world even if our world empire is under threat, in the worst case scenario we can still be a very strong capitalist power in a capitalist world system, we can do business with the Russians and Chinese, I’ve got the CEOs of multiple megacorporations on speed dial and their businesses would be really hurt by cutting off Russia and especially China, it’s all fine, we just need to make sure NATO remains intact so we have a market for our weapons” and “we’re the goddamn USA, we can bomb anywhere and infiltrate anywhere and allow our monopolies to dominate anywhere, why shouldn’t we just march in with our forces? what’s the big problem here? are you old fuckers who experienced the Cold War scared of little old Russia? are we seriously letting Putin beat us, that guy we installed as leader?”

the warhawks in and outside the Biden admin are very clearly deeply afraid of losing their hegemony, which explains why they’re acting increasingly brazenly and starting wars in as many places as they can and threatening the use of nukes (or actions that would clearly lead to nuclear exchanges), but I think it’s just (extremely dangerous) bluster in my opinion. it’s a wounded animal that is snarling and lunging. of course, however, the closer you get to the nuclear threshold, the greater the risk of accidents, so intentions might not matter at the end of the day.

But regardless of whether it is bluster or not, geopolitics has to continue and the contradictions will keep mounting. Russia can’t, and more importantly realistically won’t, be like “Well, shit. The nuclear superpower is threatening us in our existential war. I suppose we’ll just give up and become yet another American neocolony.” The DPRK didn’t decide to give up just because their invader had nukes, nor did the Vietnamese. It’s not the ultimate trump card that stops history itself from progressing, America is still perfectly capable of eating shit despite having nukes. So nuclear war isn’t really something I worry about. If America is truly, totally committed to just nuking the planet if their empire is in the process of disintegration, and if that disintegration is inevitable because of the contradictions prying the empire apart just like every single fallen empire in human history, then why worry? If it’s definitely going to happen, we might as well just get it over with right now so we can rise out of the ashes faster. If America isn’t ready to press that button to save their empire, then why worry? The empire will fall and socialism will, hopefully, soon follow. I think Mao was basically right on this point. He was also correct about Italians, which is always good.

Of course, from the most important position - which is, obviously, that of winning internet arguments - the best part of the nuclear-war-won’t-happen side is that I am undunkable. If it happens and I’m wrong, then I and most of us here are probably dead, dying, or have much better things to worry about, and the internet is dead so I can’t be owned. Whereas every year that goes by, the nuclear-war-will-happen side has to continually justify their position and lack of said nuclear war.